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Fake science papers The Newsy You: News of Today
Started May-28 by WALTER784; 1745 views.
Staff
From: WALTER784
May-28
One in three science papers is FAKE, research finds
Monday, May 15, 2023
by: Ethan Huff
(Natural News) A neuropsychologist by the name of Barnhard Sabel has developed a tool to help weed out fake scientific papers that are being published as if they were true. Shockingly, or perhaps not, Sabel found that upwards of 34 percent of published research is false.
After screening some 5,000 different published papers using what Science calls a “fake-paper detector,” Sabel learned that in 2020, the year of the fake “pandemic,” one in three published papers on neuroscience were fake.
In the broader field of medicine, Sabel discovered that about one in four published papers is fake.
Sabel and his colleagues published both of these numbers in their own paper that now appears in a medRxiv preprint that was posted on May 8.
Compared to earlier research on this topic from back in 2010, Sabel and his team learned that increasingly more scientific research is false, and yet it is still being published in what many perceive to be “reputable” scientific journals.
“It is just too hard to believe” at first, commented Sabel, who hails from Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg in Germany, and also works as editor-in-chief of the Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience journal.
Sabel would continue in his commentary to compare his discovery to if “somebody tells you 30 percent of what you eat is toxic.”
(Related: Back in 2017, we reported about a cancer researcher who is going after the entire science industry for publishing fake papers.)
Much of today’s science comes from phony “paper mills” – because it’s all about money now
It turns out that many popular journals are awash in a rising tide of scientific manuscripts that come from what are known as “paper mills,” which Science describes as:
Brighteon.TV
“… secretive businesses that allow researchers to pad their publication records by paying for fake papers or undeserved authorship.”
Dorothy Bishop, a University of Oxford psychologist who studies fraudulent publishing practices, says that paper mills have “made a fortune by basically attacking a system that has had no idea how to cope with this stuff.
Publisher Hindawi is dealing with this first-hand in a major way, having announced on May 2 that it is shutting down four of its journals entirely because they have become “heavily compromised” by articles that come from paper mills.
How Sabel’s fake-paper detector works is it looks for just two major indicators that almost always point to fraud: authors who use private, non-institutional email addresses on their work, and authors who list an affiliation with a hospital.
It is an imperfect tool, just to be clear, but it does offer substantial insight into the problem of paper mill-created scientific studies that are completely fake. And even other fake-paper detectors that use other proprietary methods of looking for false work have come to the same conclusions.
Sabel’s hope is that his tool, along with the others, will help science journals that actually want to do so, gain back an advantage over the paper mills, which continue to churn out bogus manuscripts filled with plagiarized and often fabricated text, data, and images.
“Some papers are endorsed by unrigorous reviewers solicited by the authors,” Science warns, further noting that ghost writers are notorious for “massaging” fake studies before publishing.
“Such manuscripts threaten to corrupt the scientific literature, misleading readers and potentially distorting systematic reviews. The recent advent of artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT has amplified the concern.”
The International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM), which represents 120 publishers, says it, too, is trying to fight back with the launch of a new Integrity Hub, the details of which are somewhat secretive so as to avoid tipping off paper mills.
One in three science papers is FAKE, research finds – NaturalNews.com
FWIW
Host
From: Showtalk
May-28
I would believe a percentage are fake. It happened back when I was first doing academic research as part of a grad professor project and was fired for refusing to fake results when the data didn’t get the desired results. Eventually, that professor was routed out and lost her entire career over it, though. That was back when there were more ethics in research. Is it as high as 30%? Probably not.
Staff
From: WALTER784
May-29
Fake, false and/or misleading with incorrect information would probably very easily top the 33% mark.
I made a note of several such sites over the past 10~12 years. Let me find that list and I'll post them in another post below.
FWIW
Staff
From: WALTER784
May-29
Big Science is broken
And fixing it won't be easy
Scientists may not be as honest as perceived.
PASCAL-EMMANUEL GOBRY
APRIL 18, 2016
That's the thesis of a must-read article in First Things magazine, in which William A. Wilson accumulates evidence that a lot of published research is false. But that's not even the worst part.
Advocates of the existing scientific research paradigm usually smugly declare that while some published conclusions are surely false, the scientific method has "self-correcting mechanisms" that ensure that, eventually, the truth will prevail. Unfortunately for all of us, Wilson makes a convincing argument that those self-correcting mechanisms are broken.
For starters, there's a "replication crisis" in science. This is particularly true in the field of experimental psychology, where far too many prestigious psychology studies simply can't be reliably replicated. But it's not just psychology. In 2011, the pharmaceutical company Bayer looked at 67 blockbuster drug discovery research findings published in prestigious journals, and found that three-fourths of them weren't right. Another study of cancer research found that only 11 percent of preclinical cancer research could be reproduced. Even in physics, supposedly the hardest and most reliable of all sciences, Wilson points out that "two of the most vaunted physics results of the past few years — the announced discovery of both cosmic inflation and gravitational waves at the BICEP2 experiment in Antarctica, and the supposed discovery of superluminal neutrinos at the Swiss-Italian border — have now been retracted, with far less fanfare than when they were first published."
What explains this? In some cases, human error. Much of the research world exploded in rage and mockery when it was found out that a highly popularized finding by the economists Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhardt linking higher public debt to lower growth was due to an Excel error. Steven Levitt, of Freakonomics fame, largely built his career on a paper arguing that abortion led to lower crime rates 20 years later because the aborted babies were disproportionately future criminals. Two economists went through the painstaking work of recoding Levitt's statistical analysis — and found a basic arithmetic error.
Then there is outright fraud. In a 2011 survey of 2,000 research psychologists, over half admitted to selectively reporting those experiments that gave the result they were after. The survey also concluded that around 10 percent of research psychologists have engaged in outright falsification of data, and more than half have engaged in "less brazen but still fraudulent behavior such as reporting that a result was statistically significant when it was not, or deciding between two different data analysis techniques after looking at the results of each and choosing the more favorable."
Then there's everything in between human error and outright fraud: rounding out numbers the way that looks better, checking a result less thoroughly when it comes out the way you like, and so forth.
Still, shouldn't the mechanism of independent checking and peer review mean the wheat, eventually, will be sorted from the chaff?
Well, maybe not. There's actually good reason to believe the exact opposite is happening.
The peer review process doesn't work. Most observers of science guffaw at the so-called "Sokal affair," where a physicist named Alan Sokal submitted a gibberish paper to an obscure social studies journal, which accepted it. Less famous is a similar hoodwinking of the very prestigious British Medical Journal, to which a paper with eight major errors was submitted. Not a single one of the 221 scientists who reviewed the paper caught all the errors in it, and only 30 percent of reviewers recommended that the paper be rejected. Amazingly, the reviewers who were warned that they were in a study and that the paper might have problems with it found no more flaws than the ones who were in the dark.
This is serious. In the preclinical cancer study mentioned above, the authors note that "some non-reproducible preclinical papers had spawned an entire field, with hundreds of secondary publications that expanded on elements of the original observation, but did not actually seek to confirm or falsify its fundamental basis."
This gets into the question of the sociology of science. It's a familiar bromide that "science advances one funeral at a time." The greatest scientific pioneers were mavericks and weirdos. Most valuable scientific work is done by youngsters. Older scientists are more likely to be invested, both emotionally and from a career and prestige perspective, in the regnant paradigm, even though the spirit of science is the challenge of regnant paradigms.
...[Message truncated]
Staff
From: WALTER784
May-29
Most scientific papers are probably wrong
September 1, 2005
Most published scientific research papers are wrong, according to a new analysis. Assuming that the new paper is itself correct, problems with experimental and statistical methods mean that there is less than a 50% chance that the results of any randomly chosen scientific paper are true.
John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece, says that small sample sizes, poor study design, researcher bias, and selective reporting and other problems combine to make most research findings false. But even large, well-designed studies are not always right, meaning that scientists and the public have to be wary of reported findings.
"We should accept that most research findings will be refuted. Some will be replicated and validated. The replication process is more important than the first discovery," Ioannidis says.
In the paper, Ioannidis does not show that any particular findings are false. Instead, he shows statistically how the many obstacles to getting research findings right combine to make most published research wrong.
Massaged conclusions
Traditionally a study is said to be "statistically significant" if the odds are only 1 in 20 that the result could be pure chance. But in a complicated field where there are many potential hypotheses to sift through - such as whether a particular gene influences a particular disease - it is easy to reach false conclusions using this standard. If you test 20 false hypotheses, one of them is likely to show up as true, on average.
Odds get even worse for studies that are too small, studies that find small effects (for example, a drug that works for only 10% of patients), or studies where the protocol and endpoints are poorly defined, allowing researchers to massage their conclusions after the fact.
Surprisingly, Ioannidis says another predictor of false findings is if a field is "hot", with many teams feeling pressure to beat the others to statistically significant findings.
www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42940
FWIW
Staff
From: WALTER784
May-29
Allegations of Fake Research Hit New High
July 11, 2005
Allegations of misconduct by U.S. researchers reached record highs last year as the Department of Health and Human Services received 274 complaints - 50 percent higher than 2003 and the most since 1989 when the federal government established a program to deal with scientific misconduct.
Chris Pascal, director of the federal Office of Research Integrity, said its 28 staffers and $7 million annual budget haven't kept pace with the allegations. The result: Only 23 cases were closed last year. Of those, eight individuals were found guilty of research misconduct. In the past 15 years, the office has confirmed about 185 cases of scientific misconduct.
Research suggests this is but a small fraction of all the incidents of fabrication, falsification and plagiarism. In a survey published June 9 in the journal Nature, about 1.5 percent of 3,247 researchers who responded admitted to falsification or plagiarism. (One in three admitted to some type of professional misbehavior.)
https://lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2005/jul/10/071005643.html (lasvegassun.com)
FWIW
Staff
From: WALTER784
May-29
South Korean human cloning pioneer 'admits to fake evidence'
December 16, 2005
Hwang Woo-Suk, of Seoul National University in South Korea, may withdraw a key scientific paper published in the journal Science, where he claimed to have produced individual colonies of stem cells from cloned embryos derived from donors.
Professor Hwang has already admitted to the unethical practice of using eggs from his own female co-workers as a source of the stem cells, despite repeated denials when he had been challenged about it in the past.
According to a close collaborator of Professor Hwang, the South Korean scientist has now admitted fabricating data that formed an essential part of the stem cell research published earlier this year in Science.
https://www.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article333459.ece (independent.co.uk)
FWIW
Staff
From: WALTER784
May-29
Norwegian researcher admits that his data were faked
Lynn Eaton
2006 Jan 28
The New England Journal of Medicine has joined the Lancet in issuing a statement of concern about papers the journals published by the Norwegian researcher Jon Sudbø, currently at the centre of allegations of research fraud.
It follows an announcement by officials at Radium Hospital in Oslo that Dr Sudbø, a senior consultant who wrote a paper on the link between non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and oral cancer, has told his employers that data were faked.
The study published by the Lancet in October (2005;366: 1359-66) claimed to be based on information from a national database.
In its summary of the methods used, Dr Sudbø's paper said: “We undertook a nested case-control study to analyse data from a population-based database (Cohort of Norway; CONOR), which consisted of prospectively obtained health data from all regions of Norway.”
It has emerged that, although the database in question did exist, it was not open to anyone outside the Norwegian government.
The Lancet was told on 13 January about the suspected fraud. Initially officials from Radium Hospital said they had information that “strongly indicates that material published in the Lancet has not been based upon data from our national databases, but on manipulated data.”
The next day they told the Lancet that “it was not manipulation of real data—it was just complete fabrication.”
In a statement issued on its website on 20 January (www.nejm.org, doi: 10.1056/NEJMe068020) and due to appear in print on 9 February, the New England Journal of Medicine states that a study by Jon Sudbø and others that it published in 2001 (344:1270-80) has two figures (figure 3B and figure 3C) that the authors claim are of two different patients and stages of oral epithelial dysplasia. They are in fact different magnifications of the same photomicrograph, says the journal.
The results of another study in the journal by Dr Sudbø (2004;350:1405-13) were derived from the same database as that used in the Lancet paper, the journal says, adding that as a result “we have similar concerns.”
Radium Hospital has set up an investigating committee, led by the Swedish epidemiologist Anders Ekbom, to look into the allegations and to review Dr Sudbø's other published research, including the two papers in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In the statement published in last week's Lancet (2006; 367: 196) [Google Scholar], the journal's editor, Richard Horton, said that the Lancet has been told that Dr Sudbø had made a verbal admission of fabrication.
A spokesman at Radium hospital, Stein Vaaler, told the BMJ that Dr Sudbø had admitted the fraud, was on sick leave, and would not be responding to press inquiries.
Norwegian researcher admits that his data were faked - PMC (nih.gov)
FWIW
Host
From: Showtalk
May-29
Why can’t scientific experiments be replicated? Maybe there are scientific reasons why they cannot. It could be something as simple as a different temperature in the elements or a different water source. If research isn’t precise enough it could be due to reasons that are beyond human control, not fraud. I did social research. For my dissertation, I studied something that has become common knowledge now, but I was the first to observe, study and write it up in research format. It was a subjective study, based on case studies. Someone else using different case studies may have drawn different conclusions but it doesn’t make mine wrong. So, I’m not all in on the idea it was fraud but perhaps studying slightly different things.
Host
From: Showtalk
May-29
I see a difference between outright fraud vs using different experimental variables. The articles that find 30% fraud seem to be lumping both together.
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